In digital video recorders, processing of the broadcast data stream may be required to remove broadcast scrambling before the broadcast data stream can be stored to a local hard drive. Likewise, additional scrambling can be performed prior to storing the program data on a local hard drive, and descrambling of the scrambled data must then be performed in order to play back the stored program data.
Conventional architectures for performing the scrambling and descrambling functions are often implementation-specific, and require multiple transport stream processors to perform the scrambling and descrambling. The requirement for a large number of transport stream processors not only increases the cost of the digital video recorder, but also makes a given digital video recorder architecture inapplicable for different media, such as in digital video broadcasting and digital satellite system architectures.